Shingles are frequently used for walls or roofs of structures. Wood shingles are attractive and they require little maintenance. Producing a shingled wall or roof by nailing individual shingles to sheathing is expensive because it consumes a great deal of time and because many shingles are broken during shipping and installation.
To reduce the cost of shingled structures and still preserve the advantages of shingles, prefabricated building panels having shingles mounted on a backing or base sheet have been made. A shingled wall, for example, can be made from a plurality of such panels by mounting the panels directly on a wall in side-to-side and top-to-bottom abutting relationships. The base sheet of the shingle panel may act as sheathing for the wall or roof, or the panel may be mounted over conventional sheathing. Known prefabricated building panel systems are typified by those disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,384,686; 3,333,384; 3,546,843; 3,626,651; 3,664,081; 3,844,082; 3,875,715; 3,919,822; Re. 27,502; and Re. 27,574.
Various problems are associated with known prefabricated shingled panels. The panels must be mounted side-to-side and top-to-bottom without leakage between adjacent panels and without creating an appearance different from the random shingled appearance of a hand shingled wall. In prior art panels one way of dealing with these problems is by leaving open spaces at the edges of panels, the open spaces being even widths or even fractions of widths of shingles. The spaces are filled in by hand with shingles which are temporarily nailed to the panels and then permanently secured over the joint between panels adjacent after the panels are installed. This approach is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,841,050 and still requires some hand work. A similar approach is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,256,435.
Some prefabricated panels have end shingles that overlap laterally adjacent bases, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,194,335; 4,015,392; and 3,640,044. However these panels have laterally staggered side edges or are difficult to assemble in the field, since they require sliding of adjacent shingles under one another which becomes particularly tedious as the number of courses of shingles per panel increases.
The cost competition between shingled panels in use in the industry has become intense. One system which is in wide spread use today employs sixteen inch kiln-dried cedar shingles which are cut in half to produce two eight inch long shingles and used to form a two-course shingled panel. This approach effects cost savings by enabling a single, sixteen inch shingle to be used to form a two-course panel.
While such two-course prior art panels have been economically manufactured, their field use has been found to have certain disadvantages. Such panels do not provide a joint along the vertical edges which is as aesthetically pleasing or functionally water-tight as would be preferred by most customers. Additionally, the number of panels required to form a square (one hundred square feet) of shingled area is undesirably large, requiring field personnel to spend additional time and cost manipulating and securing the panels to the wall or roof. Moreover, the manner in which the shingles are secured to the panel base requires the use of expensive kiln-dried shingles, and the cost of sixteen inch shingles, as compared for example to twelve inch shingles, is significant.
Accordingly, it is the objection to the present invention to provide a shingled building panel which can be easily assembled in the field by a single worker to produce a shingled structure having a surface which has the appearance and water-tight function of a hand-shingled structure.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a shingled building panel which can be used with similarly formed building panels to produce a shingled surface having greatly improved vertical and horizontal water-tight joints between the adjacent panels.
Another objection of the present invention is to provide a shingled building panel which can be constructed from air-dried shingles of moderate dimension, and therefore moderate cost, which panel also will retain its dimensional stability as the shingles dry further.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a shingled building panel in which the ease of field installation is greatly enhanced.
Still another object to the present invention is to provide a shingled building panel which can be easily constructed, is durable, requires fewer panels per square, and is of the size that can be manipulated easily.
The shingled building panel of the present invention has other objects and features of advantage which will become apparent from and are set forth in more detail in the accompanying drawing and the following description of the Best Mode For Carrying Out the Invention.